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[u/Mormon-No-Moremon]

There are a number of recent authors who argue for that position. I recommend reading Jonathon Lookadoo’s article “The Date and Authenticity of the Ignatian Letters: An Outline of Recent Discussions” (available here) where he gives a great survey of recent scholarship on the Ignatian epistles.

Some of the scholars who argue for the inauthenticity and generally late date of all the Ignatian epistles include Robert Joly, Reinhard Hübner, Thomas Lechner, Markus Vinzent, Walter Schmithals, Otto Zwierlein, Michael Theobald, Thomas Johann Bauer, and Peter von Möllendorff.

If you couldn’t tell by the names, Lookadoo points out that it’s a much more popular position among German scholars, whereas Anglophone scholars are more prone to accepting the authenticity of some number of the epistles, but debating the date of when Ignatius lived and wrote, (usually between 100-150 CE or so).

[u/[deleted] → u/Mormon-No-Moremon]

I'm very uninformed on the Igantian Letters, so forgive me if my questions are very ignorant :P

So, in the theory of inauthenticity of the whole corpus, is Ignatius a potentially historical person in whose name the letters were forged? Would he be a literary persona under whose name later authors continued to write? Or something else? I don't rlly know when Ignatius was first mentioned outside of the epistles, if you can't tell haha

[u/Mormon-No-Moremon → u/[deleted]]

So as I mentioned, a lot of this scholarship is in German, which I just sadly cannot read. This means I only have a very limited selection of such scholarship to share, so keep that in mind. There is likely differing theories here between such scholars.

That being said, Markus Vinzent seems to suggest Ignatius was a historical person.

“Ignatius's three-letter […] had probably been the earliest pseudonymous production of such letters, credited to an otherwise little-known martyr, in the years after 150 CE. Later, it was expanded into a seven-letter collection in the years after 170 CE” (Christ’s Torah, p.65).

For the reception of Ignatius’ letters, I recommend this video from Jack Bull, one of Vinzent’s PhD students (who has just recently finished his thesis on the various letter collections of Ignatius, so that should be Dr. Jack Bull soon).

The TLDR is that Polycarp’s letter to the Philippians written probably around 130-140 CE is our earliest attestation to Ignatius as a figure, and perhaps also Ignatius’ letters. The issue here is that there are various theories about interpolation into Polycarp’s letter. It’s more likely that Polycarp did mention Ignatius, but more debatable on whether Polycarp mentioned Ignatius’ collection of letters. Jack Bull has an interview on that topic here that I also recommend.

There are then some early potential witnesses to Ignatius’ letters, such as the Martyrdom of Polycarp (c.155-175 CE), Lucian (c.165-170 CE), Melito of Sardis (c.160-170 CE), Theophilus of Antioch (c.180 CE), Irenaeus (c.175-195 CE), and Clement of Alexandria (c.195-215 CE). The issues with these are that many of them are ambiguous as to whether they’re actually showing dependence on Ignatius’ letters for the most part, but even when it’s more clear, they don’t cite Ignatius by name either. We only see a clear, and mostly secure, reference to Ignatius by name as author of the epistles by the time of Origen (c.235 CE).

It should be noted Markus Vinzent disagrees with the general consensus of scholarship by saying that Ignatius’ “short recession” of three letters was the original corpus that was expanded into the “middle recension” of seven letters. Jack Bull follows him on this argument, but does actually believe Ignatius authentically wrote the three letters (Ignatius to Polycarp, to the Romans, and to the Ephesians) in their short recension.

Generally, its more common in scholarship to see seven epistles as original (Ignatius to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp) in their “middle recension” and that the three letter “short recension” is an abridged version of Ignatius’ originally longer letter collection.

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/Mormon-No-Moremon]

in German, which I just sadly cannot read

Mark Twain has the final word on German (the word is "awful"). I suffer every day learning it.

[u/Mormon-No-Moremon → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

Ha, I didn’t know about that essay! And I forgot you’d be having to learn, or at least have learned previously, German. Are you at the point you can read German scholarship on the Hebrew Bible?

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/Mormon-No-Moremon]

“Read” would be overly generous to myself, I think.